The asymetric shoulder is easily explained as a stylistic perspective through comparison with El Greco's other portraits of Spanish gentlemen.36 But more significantly the gentleman's hand, when compared with the opus of El Greco, is not unique, much less rare. The first two paintings were created before El Greco was born in 1541, one by a Dutch painter and one by a Spaniard from Toledo. "21 This same gesture as specified by the "Spiritual exercises" is referred to in the 1771 diary of the early American protestant minister, the Reverend Ezra Stiles, who described himself in the portrait as posed "in a Teaching Attitude, with the right hand on the Breast. This study also seeks to establish the status of the gesture within the Christian economy of salvation and its iconology, linking the gesture to the breastfeeding of goddesses, then progressively to their ability to bestow eternal life through their milk, to the gradual evolution of the gesture away from the naked breast, and its migration to men for their use in seeking maternal salvation. Thirdly, none of the above works quote the source in toto; all three leave off the final line of the paragraph in which Loyola further states that this gesture of penance can be done "even in the presence of many others without their perceiving what he is doing,"23 correlating with Jesus' commandment in Matthew 6:1, "Be careful not to do your 'acts of righteousness' before men, to be seen by them. If, like his shoulders and the location of his sword, the caballero's gesture was unique, a strong case could be made for the theory that the artist painted the portrait of an unfortunate Spanish nobleman born with two apparent congenital birth defects, the zygodactylous hand being the more obvious.

It is, however, as wanting of proof as the first. The main problem lies in the art historian's narrow view of the phenomenon, which was limited to the single painting of El Greco. El medallón escondido: El medallón que el caballero poseé apenas y se asoma entre sus prendas, dejando así lucir su presencia. Among them, in a room alongside other portraits, hangs the painting known only as " "5 The painter, however, used the hand symbol in numerous paintings almost exclusively with Jesus, Mary, and the saints (see below). As in the analysis of the cultural anthropologist, the final conclusion can only be inferred from the material since the analysis deals with the art, the history, and the religions of centuries past, and because it deals with an artifact of symbolic communication--a hand gesture--as old as art, though forgotten today. Thus, Detalle de 'El caballero de la mano en el pecho', de El Greco.

Subdivisions of this theme of 'salvation gesture' will be: (a) gender of gesturer, (b) god/dess, 'saint'/demigod, or mortal (c) location and manner of placement of gesture to body (e.g., on chest, outwards to the side, etc. Along with other proposed explanations for the gesture's existence, however, the hypothesis that the gesture is physiological, not symbolic, the result of a malformation of the gentleman's hand, has no evidence to support it. (a) type of contact, e.g,, breast/mouth, breast/hand, direct Such a description of the lactation paintings by these subdivisions provides us with a better structural view of the paintings: Drawings and photographs of the true zygodactylous hand closely resemble the hand of the caballero in El Greco's painting. That people with physical abnormalities were not uncommon subjects of the epoch's painters can be testified to by the well-known paintings of Velázquez who painted, among other subjects, "The bearded woman" and a number of the royal court's dwarfs. The caballero, a mortal man, however, was born a sinner and, by definition as a human being, remained a sinner throughout his life. What he probably refers to historically is the rite of the Priestly Benediction (dukhenen),12 also called the Kohanic Blessing -- the ritual blessing prayed over the congregation by a member of the priestly caste of the Kohanim in which "the hands are held touching at the thumbs with the first two fingers of each hand separated from the other two, thus forming a sort of fan. Thus, any hand sign used to symbolize suffering and regret of sin would not be properly used among the non-sinning deities. In only one instance has the gesture of the caballero been used in a specifically Jewish painting, and that in a twentieth-century drawing.11 Its absence in Hebrew literature and history is proof itself. Both would then be communicating, in effect, that they also feel the pain that sin creates in the hearts of men and women--a rare phenomenon of deities empathizing with humankind's worst quality.

Antonia Vallentin, in her book (1954) on the life of El Greco, wrote: El Caballero de la Mano en el pecho, de El Greco era un cuadro muy querido por Azorín que lo tenía siempre a la vista. The different mudras of northern and southern Buddhism offer an elaborate encyclopedia of hand signs,40 but none resemble the splayed hand with the third and fourth digits joined together. "24 It would seem that painting a gentleman in such a flagrant act of penitential piety would ill-behoove the "mystic" practitioner of the Exercises in his attempt at attaining spiritual salvation.